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Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have ....Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning.Long Before There Was 'Fake News,' There Were 'Fake Photos ....The Classroom Where Fake News Fails.Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts.We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs.

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So many social media outlets means so, so many different required image sizes. To help you sort out this confusing mess and streamline your marketing efforts, we share this Social Media Image Size Chart 2017. ________________________________________ Related articles Here Are The Biggest Lies People Tell On Social Media - Infographic...

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In this piece we take an in depth look at how Kendrick Lamar is able to craft tracks which have achieved such prominent mainstream appeal, while still remaining deeply personal and specific to Lamar's personal experiences.

One of Kendrick Lamar's greatest benedictions as an artist is his ability to connect, which, on the surface, seems strange, because his stories are so personal and uniquely his own.

Whether he's describing the burger spot where his uncle was murdered or his father's near-violent run in at KFC with Top Dawg's head honcho, his lyrics are vivid and intimate descriptions of his own lived experiences. Yet, there's always a thread that could apply to any of us and our own lives. Lamar invites us in with his words, his masterful flow, and his vision, taking us somewhere that feels familiar, no matter how foreign it may actually be.

Intrigue from the Start

Long before Kendrick Lamar was a hip-hop superstar performing at the Grammys and meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office, he was putting out mixtape after mixtape, solidifying his stance as Compton's newest hometown hero. After years of honing his craft and catching the eye of the West Coast's biggest rap moguls like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, Lamar finally released his major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city (GKMC), to critical acclaim and massive mainstream success.

It was essentially a record full of critic-proof bangers - from the braggadocious "Backseat Freestyle" to the heavy-hitting "m.A.A.d. City" to the club-ready "Swimming Pools (Drank)." The album crowned Lamar as a virtuosic lyricist and vocalist with a brilliant mind capable of reaching millions. Despite his complex character, the album's songs were largely accessible on a surface level and relatively devoid of experimental or obscure musical ideas.

+ Read more on Flypaper: "How Busta Rhymes Concocted the Perfect Rap Verse in 'Scenario'"

GKMC did, however, give us various glimpses of Lamar's elevated sense of artistic experimentation. On one of the album's most popular songs, "Swimming Pools (Drank)," there's a section where Lamar's conscience is speaking to him in a hazy, pitched-up voice:

Okay, now open your mind up and listen to me, Kendrick
I am your conscience, if you do not hear me then you will be history, Kendrick.

It's a brilliant use of vocal effects, displaying a call and response conversation with his voice of reason as it sinks into the sludge of intoxication. In fact, Lamar wrote "Swimming Pools (Drank)" to describe his own tribulations with alcohol and substance abuse. Yet, for most listeners who are engaging with and dancing to the song in a loud club setting, it's simply an ode to drinking and getting high.

If you've seen Lamar perform the track live, he happily embraces the track's party-anthem qualities. It's an example of his powerful ability to create a dialogue about the harms and struggles of substances while still finding a way to allow his audiences to enjoy the partying culture.

After all, hip-hop glorifies partying, which is a frequent criticism of the genre, but Kendrick himself is sober. Still, he frequently references the use of drugs because of his upbringing in Compton - infested with gang culture, drugs, and violence. He understands the nature of drug culture within the genre and lifestyle, even if he doesn't partake in it. He navigates the greater story of substance abuse and how it plays a role in our lives as an illness and a social lubricant for celebratory causes. Hip-hop, here, is both the message and the platform for sending the message.

Other GKMC cuts like the 10-minute "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" show us Lamar's more pensive, self-loathing side, unafraid of sacrificing mainstream appeal in order to connect with a greater creative cause. The song follows three characters through gang violence, prostitution, and suicidal thoughts - a set of themes not often found amongst the top charts on the radio or rattling in clubs across the country. Lamar finds a way to make us reflect, even within his infectious lifts and hooks.

+ Learn more on Soundfly: Master the processes and techniques for programming professional-grade electronic drum beats with our acclaimed mentor-driven course, Beat Making in Ableton Live.

Turning It Up a Notch... or 10

Lamar's sophomore major-label release To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB) changed the trajectory of hip-hop, challenging the status quo, honoring the past, and reaching forward to the future with complex discussions on race, identity, and society's political disarray. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Lamar revealed that TPAB was the album he wanted to make for his major-label debut, but he lacked the confidence.

This is an interesting notion, because GKMC essentially launched Kendrick into the spotlight as the greatest rapper alive with enormous pop appeal. Often when an artist finally gets that spotlight, their follow-up album winds up sounding even mainstream in order to further propel themselves to the top of the charts. An example would be The Weeknd evolving from his dark and eerie indie debut album House Of Balloons to writing low-risk pop anthems like "I Can't Feel My Face" with Max Martin. But Lamar looked even more inward and coaxed out a sprawling, dense album of pure poetic discourse - tackling his greatest demons and fusing deep-groove funk with swanky jazz and harrowing dissonance.

There are certainly some radio-friendly bangers on TPAB, such as "Alright," "King Kunta," and "These Walls," but they're the minority. With abstract jazz instrumentals and deeply dark and painful lyrics, Lamar still managed to debut at number one on the Billboard and, at the time, break the record for most streams in a day, racking up 9.6 million spins, dethroning Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late.

+ Learn more on Soundfly: Take your beats to the stage with Ableton Live, and learn about all the hardware and software you need in a few hours with our free course Live Clicks & Backing Tracks.

Lamar's achievements are similar to Radiohead's plunge into the world of abstract music while retaining the highest levels of fame. Radiohead's first three albums solidified them as one of the most important bands in the world, and when it came time to release their fourth record, they made it for no one but themselves. Kid A - an experimental art album with esoteric instrumentation and hook-less songwriting - debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, received a Grammy Award nomination for Album of the Year, and even won the award for Best Alternative Album. How the heck did an avant-garde album with no decipherable radio hits reach so many people?

Perhaps it was Radiohead's more conventional songs that came before - "Creep," "Karma Police," and "Fake Plastic Trees" - that gave them the platform to experiment on a grandiose scale. They had the world's attention, and when they delivered an artistic epic, people actually responded to the more experimental-leaning electronic songs like "Everything In Its Right Place" and "Idioteque."

Did the same happen to Kendrick Lamar? Without "Swimming Pools (Drank)," could there have ever been "u" or "FEAR."?

Lamar knows how to make a hit, and, in many ways, he uses that power to invite the listener to enjoy styles of music that aren't often represented in the pop landscape. He draws us in with comfortable ideas and then flips them upside down, leaving us confused but curious.

His newest record, DAMN., creates that exact experience. Lamar starts the album with arguably the fiercest banger of his career, "DNA." Propped up by a Mike WiLL Made-It- produced trap beat, Lamar goes bar for bar with himself, spitting venomously with a fiery flow, leaving the last bar off his tongue in a pile of bass-booming ash. Next is "YAH.," a hazy, downtempo instrumental with a somnolent Lamar nasally singing, "Yah, yah, radars is buzzzzzzzing." He quickly ascends from radio gold to another universe where the radio is nothing but a static signal of hallucinogenic jazz and space.

+ Read more on Flypaper: "6 Electronic Tracks That Kick Butt Without a Kick Drum"

Deviating from the Path

Kendrick Lamar is a puppetmaster, knowing just how to please us with the familiar and challenge us with the unknown. DAMN.'s standout pop track, "LOYALTY." featuring Rihanna, is an R&B-meets-rap banger. But Lamar isn't going to keep us in this safe place for long, which is why "PRIDE." immediately follows. Chorus-effected guitar slowly marches as Lamar's voice pitch shifts from a low growl to high chipmunk singing, "I can't fake humble just 'cause your ass is insecure."

"FEAR." is a seven-minute epic with an instrumental so skeletal and bare, only a voice as dynamic and compelling as Lamar's could keep it from growing dull. But before Lamar begins to spit, his voice is played in reverse, signaling a hidden message.

It's also important to note that Lamar's peers typically don't challenge the listener quite as much, nor do they delve into complex artistic expression and musical stratospheres that commercial radio wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. For example, Lamar's biggest rival, Drake, releases albums full of hits and radio royalty. Drake has certainly evolved as an artist, but his core sound of rap-sung-R&B-meets-hip-hop is still very much intact. His albums are not widely thematic, nor do they feature layers of complex genre crossing.

Another one of Lamar's rivals is J. Cole, who, like Drake, largely stays in line with the sound and lyrical approach that made him popular. Cole is a great storyteller and rapper, but most tracks feel safe for Cole and his fans. Future is one of the godfathers of today's popular trap sound, but if you skim through his past four or five releases, you'll begin to notice a pattern of him using the same trap-pop formula you hear on the radio and in clubs.

Similarly, Big Sean is on the rise to become one of rap's greatest stars, but when he and Lamar find themselves on a track together - whether on the industry-shattering "Control" or DJ Khaled's "Holy Key" - Lamar steals the show.

This isn't to say that Lamar is outright better than his peers; rather, he takes more risks, from innovative production techniques to lyrical topics to vocal performances. He works diligently to plant hidden, puzzling ideas deep within the music. Speaking with Zane Lowe about DAMN., Lamar said, "I want it to live for the next 20 years. So you have to listen to it over and over and over again to fully understand the direction and the message I put in there and the execution of it."

On another note, rappers like Killer Mike and EL-P (Run The Jewels) are deeply political, conceptual, and embrace their radio unfriendliness with aggressive instrumentation and socially-progressive lyricism buoyed by swagger and personality. But Run The Jewels don't move units comparable to Lamar. On the TPAB cut "Hood Politics," he rapped about the Atlanta MC, saying:

Critics want to mention that they miss when hip-hop was rappin' Motherf*^#er if you did, then Killer Mike'd be platinum.

He goes on to further condemn the critics:

Y'all priorities are f*^#ed up, put energy in wrong sh*^.

+ Read more on Flypaper: "How Missy Elliott Works the Beat in 'Lose Control'"

In addition, other rappers like Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, and TDE label mate Ab-Soul put experimentation and impressive wordplay at the forefront of their music, but none of them are headlining Coachella. Even hip-hop legends like Talib Kweli and Atmosphere never reached the mainstream success of Lamar.

He's able to teeter between such contrasting roles of being an artists' artist, and also a mainstream pop star. Much of Kendrick Lamar's allure comes from his visceral approach to music and his magnetic vulnerability. His thoughts, emotions, and message are meticulously emphasized in ways that are both human and transcendent. He's put in the 10,000 hours of work on his craft. He creates for his family still in Compton; his friends behind bars, trapped in cycles of poverty and crime; his profound respect and love for hip-hop - a genre that illuminated the dark path Lamar may have fallen down if it weren't for music.

"I'm not doing it to have a good song or one good rap or good hook or good bridge. I want to keep doing it every time, period. And to do it every time, you have to challenge yourself and you have to confirm to yourself, not anybody else, confirm to yourself that you're the best, period."

I guess from here, we'll leave it to HOT 97's Rosenberg to take us out.

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How Kendrick Lamar Achieves Mainstream Appeal Using A Complex, Innovative Approach

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In this piece we take an in depth look at how Kendrick Lamar is able to craft tracks which have achieved such prominent mainstream appeal, while still remaining deeply personal and specific to Lamar's personal experiences. ___________________________ Guest post by Sam Friedman of Soundfly's Flypaper One of Kendrick Lamar's greatest...

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A square meal: how restaurants are courting the Instagram crowd

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A square meal: how restaurants are courting the Instagram crowd

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Leonid Shutov pulls out his phone. It's just past breakfast in London, and he is sipping an espresso at a green banquette inside Bob Bob Ricard, his restaurant on the corner of Upper James Street and Beak Street in Soho. This is the kind of place that, like fabulous wealth or a bad hangover, isn't seen much before lunchtime. It's too delicate.

The walls are lined with chiyogami bookbinding papers imported from Japan, a dappled pattern of silver cranes flying across an ink-blue night. At each table there is a button in which capital letters spell out: "PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE". A huge blousy bouquet of pink flowers overwhelms the bar, where, later on, they'll be serving fine vodkas at -18c.

What the 50-year-old restaurateur, in his cheerful accent (half native Russian, half adopted English), opens up Instagram to show off is a photo of a drinks coaster. "Just this morning, I was looking at someone in San Francisco posting a picture of one of our coasters," he says proudly. In the comments underneath the post, Shutov notes, somebody else had deduced from the coaster's livery that it was from Bob Bob Ricard. "BBR" has a light gold, art deco logo that adorns much of a meal here, from the plates to the menu to the coaster to the billfold.

"There's a value of having someone be able to recognise that. If you search on Instagram by London restaurants and food, a lot of beautifully executed shots come up on fine china but you'd be hard pressed to say where they were without looking at the geotags to identify them easily."

Food is a great feeder of Instagram - some 208 million posts have been tagged on the photosharing app with the "food" hashtag since it was founded in 2010 - and, for a restaurant like Shutov's, it is a branding opportunity. The photographic revolution sparked by the modern mobile phone and its inbuilt camera means that a large number of consumers arrive with a nuanced understanding of what might make an appealing image on a forum such as Instagram.

Increasingly, as the social sphere becomes more crowded, the challenge for a restaurateur is to anticipate the customer's visual tastes correctly - to create tables, dishes and settings that are photographs waiting to happen. Shutov almost always uses pictures on his restaurant's Instagram feed that customers have taken themselves.

It creates a flattering reflection of the good times people have at BBR, while also reinforcing the graphic identity of what is a relatively small restaurant with 176 covers, best known for those PRESS FOR CHAMPAGNE buttons and the gallons of fizz it drinks through as a result - "more than 3,000 bottles in a slow month," Shutov says.

"We absolutely love social media - as far as restaurants go, it's the great equaliser. It's amplified word of mouth. You can't distort it easily but it allows you to bypass a lot of the conventional media. Stories that wouldn't be big enough to make it on to conventional media will flourish on social media, and that's very important to us."

Which is why Shutov, who founded an advertising agency in Russia that he sold in 2007 to Ogilvy, and opened BBR in 2008, has just invested an undisclosed sum in making his restaurant more Instagrammable. That means whiter plates, clearer logos, pretty photo-catching new dishes such as chicken Kiev in a bonnet shape, truffled fries and a goat's curd and beetroot starter that looks like a Parisian petit four.

"We always had people photographing the table when it's filled with food," Shutov notes, with the Beef Wellington and Chocolate Glory popular choices, "however, as soon as we changed to new plates, people got excited; we know we've done something right."

***

Instagram began with a yellow fluffy dog at a taco stand in Mexico. The first image on the photo-sharing app was taken in Todos Santos by its co-founder Kevin Systrom, of a Labrador lying winsomely at his girlfriend's feet. After being uploaded to a test site, the photo - and Instagram - went live in October 2010. The rest, Systrom said, "is history" - people flocked to the idea of retro square-format photos that could be processed on their phone through different "filters" and edited for effect, creating public albums of whatever a person wanted to show from their life (barring full nudity).

Now Instagram is much more than that: a platform for businesses in fashion, food and media to net new interest in their products, to play with brand identity and to make instant impact when they need to refresh a corporate image that's going stale. Not every brand uses it well, but Instagram counts 600 million monthly active users worldwide and was sold to Facebook for $1bn in 2012.

Last year, to keep pace with the more youthful aesthetic of its rival Snapchat, it introduced "Stories", a feature that enables users to upload snippets of video and photos that they've taken in the past 24 hours, which then disappear after a day - a little self-dissolving diary that is like an extra window into someone's life. Like much of Instagram, it can become addictive.

This allure is part of what makes hospitality designers now include Instagram in their thinking right from the drawing board. Afroditi Krassa, who has her own design studio based in London, has worked for clients from Heston Blumenthal to Curzon Cinemas. She has been in the industry for 15 years so, like the original interior of Bob Bob Ricard, her experience pre-dates the explosion of social media. Should Instagram be part of the modern restaurant's strategy? "One hundred per cent yes," she says, sitting in Bala Baya, the Bermondsey pitta café-bar she designed and invested in. Housed in a converted railway arch, it has an open kitchen, white marble counter and a huge chandelier hanging from the Victorian brick ceiling.

Over the day's lunch special of orange-and-harissa fried chicken in fresh-made pitta wraps, Krassa explains her view of social media and its role in hospitality marketing: "It's still word of mouth but the mouth is Instagram. Hoteliers were ahead of the game - they sell their product through photos. They were the first to say five or six years ago, 'How would this photograph?'. In food, the first [to use social media] were not luxury restaurants but casual street-food places with a younger audience."

Every little detail counts - and, as an example of how minutely considered restaurant design can become, she cites the "Mexican eatery" chain Barburrito, which has 14 outlets across the UK. "There is an obsession with photographing the burrito in foil. People make shapes with the foil - and so it has branded the foil." When you look at Instagram posts from people eating out, she adds, "90 per cent of the photo is food, not the space". Hence the branding on a foil wrapper can become important, and why the size of the plates, the colour of the glasses all matter. "I see the table as an artist would a canvas."

If you want to get people taking photos from outside the restaurant, you have to create something out of the ordinary - what Krassa calls "kerb appeal". In Soho, she designed the Greek grill Suvlaki - and with a relatively small budget she struck on the idea of painting a Greek poem on to the restaurant façade. And so "Ithaca" by CP Cavafy, about a craving and longing for a sense of home, often pops up on social media in pictures of the restaurant.

Ali Busacca, head of community at Instagram for Europe, Middle East and Africa, says that the Italian restaurant Pietro Nolita in New York is another venue that was "very vocal about keeping Instagram in consideration when designing the space; it's entirely pink, and people were IG-ing it [shorthand for Instagramming] before it was open."

So-called "millennial pink" is the colour of the moment. Sketch in London is another predominantly pink restaurant that pops up a lot on Instagram, Busacca says, but she also notes that there is a move away from the obvious and contrived on Instagram, and the app's users are starting to change the way in which they photograph food and social food occasions. "We've seen a shift from ordered tables and menus to an over-the-top and chaotic style, with an explosion of colour, and tables filled with plates. It's more family style and congenial, flatware is mismatched."

For the past few years, this was not the prevailing style of food photography on Instagram - accounts such as Symmetry Breakfast, which shows overhead shots of perfectly matching breakfast portions, epitomised a technique that came to be known as the "flat lay" - an aerial view of an invariably enviable lifestyle. It was easy enough to achieve, if you were prepared to get the necessary height on your shot of a café's latte art by standing on a chair. But nowadays it has become unfashionable to be too overt about your social media activity over a meal.

"Six, seven years ago, people had cameras the size of a small car; it made it a lot more disruptive," Shutov says. "Taking a good photo on a phone is easier; ultimately, people want to take the photo as quickly as possible and then move on."

Fah Sundravorakul, a restaurateur who runs hotpot specialist Shuang Shuang at the edge of London's Chinatown, says: "Every time people are at a restaurant they eat with their phones first - it's a common theme anywhere now. At the moment Instagram is not showing any signs of slowing down."

The photosharing site can be a stranger to itself in this regard; a community of users that is as unpredictable and faddish as a community in any sphere, with trends that can cross continents. "Things bubble up quickly and spread quickly," says Busacca. " The Freakshake [a milkshake piled high with cookie chunks and whipped cream] is a good example, as it started in Australia in August 2015 and then made its way to London. Out of New York there is a trend called unicorn lattes - a light blue-violet concoction of sugar and wellness ingredients sprinkled with fairy dust. It's a whimsical approach to food."

Sundravorakul is preparing to bring the "raindrop cake" to Yamagoya, the ramen pop-up above Shuang Shuang. The raindrop cake is a water jelly served with soybean powder and brown sugar syrup - an Instagram hit in New York but a Japanese creation from Yamanashi prefecture. "I'm 100 per cent sure [customers] would take a picture of it. The raindrop cake is a social phenomenon Stateside, so it will be interesting to see if it has the same effect here."

***

Leonid Shutov travelled to the Czech Republic to find a factory that could make his new titanium crystal glassware for the right price; it's an important cost to keep as low as possible, since glasses get broken every night at BBR, and a few also find their way out the door in customers' bags.

"As markets are getting more international, in a way sometimes the internet is making things harder to find because you're trying to access things that are different. So we focused on creating things that were bespoke. We are very conscious that the unique look that we have gives us a very strong presence on Instagram . . . It's an endorsement of your design if it's so desirable that people want to have it." (The Richard Caring-owned Mayfair restaurant Sexy Fish has anticipated this impulse too with a message on the underside of its chopstick rests: "Stolen from Sexy Fish" - an eminently Instagrammable picture, naturally.)

Mid-market restaurants are "getting a lot more competitive," says Shutov. "They are able to emulate what high-end restaurants can do; if you expect people to see you as a step above, you need to give them a distinctive reason why it is so. The mid-market is very good at picking up on big design ideas and doing it convincingly."

His new plates were made from bone china by Wedgwood, "whiter than normal porcelain, with greater contrast. They fired samples for us and we looked at all the different lighting settings that we have." Like Pietro Nolita and Sketch, BBR also has its splashes of pink, but "it's a complicated relationship because strong colour competes with food," Shutov says. "On arrival the whole table is completely pink. Whereas when the food starts to arrive there's a lot more white and gold; pink remains on bread plates, accent plates and little underplates for side dishes. There's been a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you think, 'What have I done?'"

What Instagram has done is create a marketplace for everyday visual ideas, but it's underwritten by the complexity of social impulses. Why do people want to share photos of their food? One answer emerges from the mini-birthday gateau with sparkler that Bob Bob Ricard offers as a complimentary cake "for anybody celebrating - it's very West End musical. You want to make it a memorable experience. And if it makes you want to photograph, it's probably special." Whether Instagram is making food taste any better is yet to be seen.
Natalie Whittle is associate editor of FT Weekend Magazine All pictures taken at Bob Bob Ricard Photographs: Luke & Nik
Letter in response to this article:
I cannot fathom what is so 'special' about froth / From James Morson

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A square meal: how restaurants are courting the Instagram crowd

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Leonid Shutov pulls out his phone. It's just past breakfast in London, and he is sipping an espresso at a green banquette inside Bob Bob Ricard, his restaurant on the corner of Upper James Street and Beak Street in Soho. This is the kind of place that, like fabulous wealth or a bad hangover, isn't seen much before lunchtime.

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Mashable Debuts exclusively premieres music, videos, artwork, trailers and more. You saw it here first!

In American Gods, belief is power.

In the new Starz series, based on the bestselling novel by Neil Gaiman, a war is brewing between the Old Gods and the New, with one unfortunate man, ex-con Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), caught in the middle. The traditional Old Gods, with mythological roots from around the world, fear irrelevance as their believers die off or are seduced by the shiny New Gods, like Media (Gillian Anderson) and Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), who represent our obsessions with technology, celebrity, money and pop culture.

According to the world of American Gods, if you're fixated on your smartphone or, say, a TV series adaptation of your favorite book (maybe even one executive produced by Hannibal's Bryan Fuller and Logan screenwriter Michael Green, who can say?), you give those ideas power, strengthening the New Gods who feed off our attention while the religious deities of old grow increasingly weak and forgotten.

Perhaps the perfect way to sum up the genius of the new series, which premieres April 30, is through Starz's new promotional campaign, which takes classic pieces of American art and gives them a techy twist to illustrate our 21st century priorities - just in time for #TechTuesday.

Mashable has an exclusive sneak peek at three new images, based on Grant Wood's American Gothic, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Norman Rockwell's Cousin Reginald Plays Tickly Bender.

It's a little too real, but that's what makes it kind of perfect.

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'American Gods' gives classic art a tech twist, because it already knows us way too well

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Mashable Debuts exclusively premieres music, videos, artwork, trailers and more. You saw it here first! In American Gods, belief is power. In the new Starz series, based on the bestselling novel by Neil Gaiman, a war is brewing between the Old Gods and the New, with one unfortunate man, ex-con Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), caught in the middle.

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Here the FanBridge team shares what they suspect will be some of 2017's up and coming social media trends with regard to visual content and social messaging, as well as paid advertising and social commerce.

We recently discussed a few up and coming trends for email marketers in 2017. But since we're firm believers that email & social media work hand in hand, we wonder what this year has in store for social marketers.

Visual content

With the continued evolution of live streaming content in 2016, there's no doubt we'll come across newer advancements in live video throughout 2017. With the debut of Facebook Live and Instagram's Live stories last year, along with Twitter's Periscope app, brands have wasted no time in taking advantage of new ways to market themselves through livestreaming. These tools have proven themselves to be a low-budget method of candidly connecting brands with their audience while yielding results.

We've also seen a growing interest from brands in temporary content. Snapchat first blazed the trail for ephemeral social content upon release, followed by Instagram with the release of new Instagram Direct features in August and this year's Facebook Stories release. Like live video, these tools allow brands to create raw content that give audiences a candid glimpse into their favorite brands. And with the temporary nature of the content, there's a number of innovative ways to make the best of these resources.

Can Facebook Stories compete with Snapchat?

There's a possibility that we'll also see a rise in virtual/augmented reality marketing for brands. While widespread accessibility for marketing with this tech hasn't quite arrived for smaller brands, large companies have still been making the best of what's available in incredible ways. With Snapchat lenses and Facebook masks for live video, it's a matter of time before more platforms begin to adopt this functionality for small businesses.

Social messaging

Recent advancements in automation have led to platforms introducing chatbots to provide support for customers. Tools like WhatsApp, Kik or Facebook Messenger's chatbots allow you to engage your audience during times when you and your team are unavailable. And with the right tweaks, you can create a chatbot that seamlessly furthers your brand's identity for you. While this kind of functionality has experienced some growing pains in the past year, we believe there's a strong possibility for advancements in artificial intelligence tools for social marketers in the near future.

Facebook Chatbots can provide automated support 24/7

Paid advertising

In the past year, many major social platforms underwent algorithm changes to determine how content displays in users' feeds. Given this algorithmic shift and an increase in brands using social platforms for marketing, social reach experienced a drastic decline as the noise of social marketing grew. Now, more brands are switching to paid social ads to amplify their content and work around newsfeed algorithms to get in front of their audiences. These tools are used to target content to the right audience for maximum efficiency. And when used with social analytics, you can determine the perfect audience for your ads and see if your campaigns are providing a valuable return on investment. But while paid social ads can be valuable for your brand, it can only help so much if your content isn't up to par.

Social ecommerce

In 2016, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat rolled out features to allow brands to post and sell merchandise through social media, joining Pinterest on the roster of social platforms with e-commerce capabilities. These features allow customers to easily access product info while browsing your content and even make purchases directly from your posts. It can be an excellent opportunity for smaller brands to advertise their products at little-to-no cost.

Pinterest has transformed into an ecommerce powerhouse for marketers

Do these trends have a chance of becoming the new norm for social marketing? Or will we have moved on to bigger and better things by 2018? Try these out for your brand and find out what excites your fans most!

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Top Social MediaTrends Of 2017 And How To Make The Most Of Them

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Here the FanBridge team shares what they suspect will be some of 2017's up and coming social media trends with regard to visual content and social messaging, as well as paid advertising and social commerce. ___________________________ Guest post from Team FanBridge We recently discussed a few up and coming trends...

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After the shocking video of security services (who were called by United staff) dragging a United Airlines passenger off a plane because the company had overbooked the flight went viral, the tone-deaf response from United's CEO spawned the #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos hashtag, which has been trending on Twitter.

Here's the actual incident:

@united @FoxNews @CNN not a good way to treat a Doctor trying to get to work because they overbooked pic.twitter.com/sj9oHk94Ik
- Tyler Bridges (@Tyler_Bridges) April 9, 2017

And here's just one of United's CEO Oscar Munoz's tone-deaf replies to the incident:

And here's how Twitter responded:

Calm down, get back to you're seat, I'll handle this !#NewUnitedAirlinesMottos#TuesdayThought #TuesdayMotivation pic.twitter.com/XS6nqVrgQM
- STOCK MONSTER (@StockMonsterUSA) April 11, 2017

In marketing, timing is everything! ????#United #UnitedAirlines #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos pic.twitter.com/dtAD1HH24d
- Mrigank Tyagi (@immrigank) April 11, 2017

#NewUnitedAirlinesMottos
United Airlines - Prepare to Board pic.twitter.com/g4O2JhBPrZ
- HashMaster2000 (@ThatHashThough) April 11, 2017

#NewUnitedAirlinesMottos
Volunteer, or we'll make you volunteer pic.twitter.com/K4kXgaB7Kq
- Fabian (@itsFabian) April 11, 2017

Book now and you'll pay later. #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos #TheResistance #UniteBlue #StrongerTogether #DemForce #DumpTrump #NotMyPresident pic.twitter.com/vfwcXICv1f
- Gregg Brownell (@gregg_brownell) April 11, 2017

United Airlines working to Make America Great Again #MAGA #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos pic.twitter.com/zPTUWHwR57
- LindaLJ11 (@LindaLJ11) April 11, 2017

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United Airlines has a social media nightmare on its hands

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After the shocking video of security services (who were called by United staff) dragging a United Airlines passenger off a plane because the company had overbooked the flight went viral, the tone-deaf response from United's CEO spawned the #NewUnitedAirlinesMottos hashtag, which has been trending on Twitter.

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Instagram has become one of the best social media platforms through which to reach profitable music fans, but a key part of marketing and promotion is the proper use of hashtags. Here we look at how determine which are most effective.

According to Nielsen Research, if you want want to reach music lovers, Instagram is one of the best platforms to use for promotion. Why? Well first of all, Instagram users are huge music fans, and spend 42% more money on music and listen 30% more than the general population. In fact, the typical Instagram user spends a surprising $269 per year on music, which is about twice as much as the average music fan that subscribes to a streaming service. That's what makes Instagram promotion so valuable.

Hashtags are an essential part of Instagram marketing and promotion, so it's important that you're familiar with how they work on the platform. Contrary to all other networks, on Instagram, the more hashtags you use, the better. That's because hashtags are the primary way you build a community on the platform. Believe it or not, between 7 and 11 hashtags get the most engagement, according to most studies.

That said, make sure you do some research as to which hashtags you'll use. Hyper-focused hashtags will put your images in front of a more interested audience. That means that you should use hashtags relevant to music, and to your music and brand in particular.

Three ways to search for new hashtags include hashtagify.me, websta.me/search, or picodash.com. Some of the most popular music related hashtags include:

The best hashtags for getting new followers are:

Finally, don't forget to include a custom hashtag of you or your band, if your following is large enough, and consistently use it on all your posts.

Hashtags constantly change in popularity depending upon the current trends, so make sure you do regularly searches just to be sure that you're using the best ones for your posts so that your Instagram promotion remains viable.

You can read more from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com or Lynda.com.

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Best Promotional #Instagram #Hashtags For Artists And Bands

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Instagram has become one of the best social media platforms through which to reach profitable music fans, but a key part of marketing and promotion is the proper use of hashtags. Here we look at how determine which are most effective. ____________________________ Guest Post by Bobby Owsinski on Music 3.0...

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Walk into the offices of Memac Ogilvy Advize, an advertising firm on the third floor of a car rental building in a business district of West Amman, Jordan, and you'll be greeted with an immense black-and-white photo of Donald Trump's face. The red cursive text printed across it reads: "We Trumped the awards."

The sign sits behind a reception counter boasting a large trophy won at the Dubai Lynx 2017, an annual advertising competition where Memac Ogilvy won the Grand Prix for PR (a first for any Jordanian agency) along with four other silver and gold prizes, for trolling Trump in their ads on behalf of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

🍊 ⛔️✈️️ #USElections pic.twitter.com/yBDVO2w3gb
- Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) November 8, 2016

Royal Jordanian, the once-obscure national carrier of the small desert kingdom of Jordan, has been making a name for itself as the Middle Eastern airline that dared to mock Trump. Its first ad-the one that won Memac Ogilvy all those awards-was a simple image published on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram on November 8, 2016, just before the U.S. election results were announced. The ad showed economy and business class prices for RJ flights to Chicago, Detroit, and New York, with a few snarky lines above: "Just in case he wins... Travel to the U.S. while you're still allowed to!"

That ad went viral, with an organic reach of 450 million, an 80.3 percent positive response, and press coverage on 26 official news sites and blogs, according to Memac Ogilvy.

The campaign summary that the agency later submitted for the advertising competition was simple. Objective? "Sell more plane tickets to the U.S." Method? "Use Donald Trump's ban of Muslims to our advantage." Campaign budget? "Zero USD."

According to a video of the award acceptance on the ad agency's Facebook page, RJ bookings to the U.S. increased by 50 percent after the campaign. "We tweeted more than Trump himself," the voiceover narration noted.

✈ 🇺🇸 ✅ #DonaldTrump #MuslimBan pic.twitter.com/rptY3dS3Xh
- Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) February 5, 2017

In early February, when American judges blocked Trump's ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, RJ stepped into the conversation once again, releasing an ad with the word "Ban" scratched out and changed to "Bon Voyage!" Flights to New York, Chicago, and Detroit were on sale, the image announced, urging customers, "Fly to the U.S. with RJ now that you're allowed to." The sentiment was especially pertinent for Jordan, which hosts millions of refugees and displaced people from countries like Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen-all of which had been included in Trump's executive order.

On March 22, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that electronics "larger than a smartphone" would be banned as carry-on items for flights departing from 10 Middle Eastern and North African airports, including Amman's Queen Alia International Airport, RJ spoke up again. The airline responded to the #electronicsban, first with a poem beginning with "Every week a new ban," then with a list of "12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no laptop or tablet," and finally with a recommendation to "Do what we Jordanians do best... Stare at each other!" The posts have already garnered tens of thousands of shares as well as international media coverage lauding RJ's response to the laptop ban as " snarky," " cheeky" and " perfect."

#electronicsban 🚫 pic.twitter.com/U3S7sdkipy
- Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) March 23, 2017

The mastermind behind all these campaigns is the creative team at Memac Ogilvy, led by Hadi Alaeddin, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian art director who also designs posters and T-shirts on the side. He co-runs a branding service called Warsheh and does some work with Jo Bedu, a popular Jordanian brand known for its tongue-in-cheek T-shirts and arabizi (Arabic/English) puns.

When I met Alaeddin, together with Khalil Atieh and Aya Nasif, two Jordanian millennials who handle client services for the Royal Jordanian campaign, they told me that the Trump ads were a spontaneous idea.

"It was real-time, on the spot. We didn't have a strategy," Nasif said. "Hadi just thought of it."

Eight months ago, Royal Jordanian approached Memac Ogilvy seeking help with an image refresh. Founded by the late Jordanian King Hussein bin Talal in 1963, the national carrier had been faithfully flying from the Levant across the region for decades, but developed a somewhat stuffy, overly institutional feel in the process. "RJ wanted to be a 'fun brand,'" Nasif explained, especially as it struggled to compete with lavishly funded Gulf airlines like Emirates and Qatar Airways. While oil-rich competitors can afford to produce Jennifer Aniston commercials and to paint planes with roses for Valentine's Day, Jordan's airline has a far smaller budget. So, it decided to play to its strength: humor-specifically, Jordanian humor, with just the right touch of sarcasm.

"Jordan can definitely compete with the Gulf," Alaeddin said, noting that his country has a local way of being, a shared mentality rooted in Levantine culture, which an international metropolis like Dubai may lack. "We have our own humor, culture, and way of talking. We have our personality. That's our edge."

👨🏻‍💻⛔👩🏻‍💻🇯🇴 #electronicsban pic.twitter.com/3csTSEePg7
- Royal Jordanian (@RoyalJordanian) March 23, 2017

"It's never about politics. The whole world was following the election. People don't follow the election for politics. It's just what everyone is talking about," Alaeddin said. So when everyone was discussing Trump's comments about banning Muslims, the ad agency joined in, the way a Jordanian uncle would. "We just made a silly joke. And people responded to it."

Within an hour of the first Trump ad, Alaeddin's phone battery had died from all the notifications that kept popping up. People across the world were responding, even those with no ties to the region or plans to fly Royal Jordanian. "Even non-Muslims globally saw that the sweeping statement was ridiculous for a president-to-be," Atieh said. "They said things like, 'Thank you for making fun of this,' especially since the joke was coming from the people who are most affected."

I watched from inside the Memac Ogilvy office as the team released their most popular recent ad-the "12 things to do on a 12-hour flight" ad-including the pointed number 12: "Think of reasons why you don't have a laptop or tablet with you." I wondered: Was that supposed to imply that the ban is nonsensical? (DHS appeared to be concerned about potential explosives hidden in electronics following intelligence reports, and the similar British ban seems to be based on this intelligence as well.) Why didn't the ad directly name Trump, or contain an explicit message about security threats?

"We're kind of passive-aggressive," Alaeddin laughed, adding that RJ did publish an official release about the details of the ban, but that talking about terror is a poor marketing strategy. "Our job is not to tell people there's a ban. People already know. Our job is to communicate in a lighthearted way that, yeah, this is happening, but here's our point of view."

Royal Jordanian doesn't want to lose business, but they also can't force American policy to change. So they'll do the next best thing, which is to affirm the overwhelming response from their customers and from residents of Jordan writ large: "It's annoying!" Nasif said. "All of us travel. I can only imagine how it would have been when I was in university, having to worry about this whenever I flew home from the States."

"We know it's annoying and we're trying our best to accommodate," Alaeddin said, adding that they'd given RJ some ideas about ways to enhance on-board entertainment without laptops. The comments on RJ's Facebook ads are filled with requests for free inflight Wi-Fi, for example. If Jordanians can't impact the American president's decisions, at least they can feel that their airline cares what they think, and then support RJ in return.

After all, that's what made the first Trump ad so successful. "It was a lighthearted response to a somewhat hateful claim," Alaeddin said. "More importantly, it sold."

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The Jordanian Airline Making Money Off the Laptop Ban

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Walk into the offices of Memac Ogilvy Advize, an advertising firm on the third floor of a car rental building in a business district of West Amman, Jordan, and you'll be greeted with an immense black-and-white photo of Donald Trump's face. The red cursive text printed across it reads: "We Trumped the awards."

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Influencer Marketing Etc - Lessons - Tes Teach

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Digital Marketing in the Age of Influencers | SXSW Convergence 2016.How Does Influencer Marketing Work?

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I've always been well-liked. At least, I think that's the case. I have friends, a spouse, a job, a college degree. I exercise. I get haircuts regularly.

And yet lately I've felt unrealized-incomplete, almost. Everywhere I look on social media, I'm surrounded by extremely attractive, superbly groomed men and women who eat meals that are not only healthy but impeccably plated. My clothes seem tired, wrinkled, bereft of accessories. And my vacation photos-Christ, my vacation photos.

I should mention I've been spending a lot of time on Instagram, the app for sharing photos that is also, according to sociologists and my own experience, a perfectly designed self-esteem subversion service. Whereas Snapchat encourages users to create rainbow-vomit selfies that disappear after 24 hours, Instagram's sleek design and flattering filters encourage its more than 500 million users to sexify their landscapes and soften their harshest features. It helps them turn snapshots into something out of the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine.

Because of this-and because advertising budgets will inevitably flow to any medium where large numbers of people are spending large amounts of time-Instagram has attracted a sort of professional class. These "influencers," as they're known, are media properties unto themselves, turning good looks and taste into an income stream: Brands pay them to feature their wares. Look a little more closely at your Instagram feed, and you'll probably notice that attached to the post of the gleaming hotel lobby, the strappy heels, the exquisitely berried breakfast is a sea of hashtags-among them, #ad or #sp, which discreetly disclose that these are in fact sponsored posts.

There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of influencers making a living this way. Some make a lot more than a living. The most successful demand $10,000 and up for a single Instagram shot. Long-term endorsement deals with well-known Instagrammers, such as Kristina Bazan, who signed with L'Oréal last year, can be worth $1 million or more. Big retailers use influencers, as do fashion brands, food and beverage companies, and media conglomerates. Condé Nast, publisher of the New Yorker and Vogue, recently announced that it would ask IBM's artificial intelligence service, Watson, to take a break from finding cancer treatments to identify potential influencers.

"Constantly," Floruss said, when I asked him how often he takes pictures of himself

Earlier this year, on the marketing website Digiday, an anonymous social media executive ranted that marketers were essentially throwing money away on influencers, whom the ranter characterized as talentless. That made me curious, and I started asking around to understand just how hard this job really is. Some swore the work is difficult. "If it was so easy to be an influencer, then every single person on earth would do it," said Gary Vaynerchuk, who parlayed a YouTube channel into an ad agency, VaynerMedia, that specializes in social media marketing and now employs about 750 people. But another influencer guru, Daniel Saynt of the agency Socialyte, disputed that. With the right guidance, he said, almost anyone could Instagram professionally. To prove it, he made me an offer: He'd help me become an influencer myself.

The plan, which I worked out with my editor and a slightly confused Bloomberg Businessweek lawyer, was this: With Saynt's company advising me, I would go undercover for a month, attempting to turn my schlubby @mchafkin profile into that of a full-fledged influencer. I would do everything possible within legal bounds to amass as many followers as I could. My niche would be men's fashion, a fast-growing category in which I clearly had no experience. The ultimate goal: to persuade someone, somewhere, to pay me cash money for my influence.

In late September, two weeks before the experiment was slated to begin, I reported to Socialyte's headquarters in New York's SoHo neighborhood. The agency manages 100 or so Instagram personalities, taking 30 percent of their bookings in exchange for setting them up with gigs. Many of these clients have millions of followers, and Saynt won't talk to you unless you have about 100,000, but he agreed to make an exception for me and my 212. Saynt, a big man with a soft voice who wears an expression of perpetual amusement, greeted me with a hug and apologized for being a little lethargic. "I'm on a detox," he said, adding that the previous week-Fashion Week in New York-he'd been on a seven-drink, pack-a-day bender. He mostly stayed quiet as Beca Alexander, his ex-wife and Socialyte's president, and Misty Gant, the vice president for talent, peppered me with advice.

Photographer: Amy Lombard for Bloomberg Businessweek

I needed a haircut, for sure, and would have to keep my fingernails clean. Socialyte would suggest a photographer for me to hire, and I was told to bring 20 or so mix-and-match outfits to a shoot, to generate a huge volume of "looks" to post each day.

"So," Gant asked me, "what brands do you wear?"

After an awkward exchange during which I half-muttered the words "J" and "Crew," it was decided that I couldn't be trusted to dress myself. Saynt and his team would find brands willing to lend me clothes and would enlist a couple of influencers to help me put ensembles together. I would bring essentially nothing to the table. "You don't have a cute dog, do you?" Alexander asked.

A week later, after a haircut the price and duration of which I refuse to share, I met Marcel Floruss and Nathan McCallum, two of Socialyte's professional clients, at Lord & Taylor to borrow some outfits. The two men are opposites in almost every way. McCallum is compact and favors ripped jeans and piercings, and Floruss is lanky and clean-cut. Both are cartoonishly handsome, and both (I noticed this later when I checked out their Instagram work) have amazing abdominal muscles. "Constantly," Floruss said, when I asked him how often he takes pictures of himself. "You sell part of your soul. Because no matter what beautiful moment you enjoy in your life, you're going to want to take a photo and share it. Distinguishing between when is it my life and when am I creating content is a really big burden."

I'd assumed two things about the beautiful people of Instagram. First, I figured they used the service the way Instagram suggests-that is, snapping pics and immediately sharing them with friends. Second, I assumed they took the photos themselves. Neither was true, as I learned when, on an unseasonably warm morning in early October, I brought 18 outfits to the Socialyte office. I met James Creel, my photographer for the day, as well as McCallum, who'd agreed to offer me styling tips, and his own regular photographer, Walt Loveridge, who'd joined in case McCallum felt inspired to do some modeling himself. The plan, as we trooped out the door into SoHo, was to shoot all the looks in a single day. "Let's go find some walls," Creel said.

The basic formula for most influencer portraits involves standing in front of a textured backdrop-usually a wall that's brick or painted in some stylish way-and looking off, unsmiling, into the middle distance. Creel, who works as a personal trainer when he's not shooting Instagram models, asked me to step out from doorways, so he could capture me paparazzi-style. He constantly asked me to run my fingers through my hair, and I was forced, for several hours I think, to rock onto and off of curbs, as if I were charismatically jaywalking. We ended up needing a second day. At one point during our 12 or so hours together, after I'd successfully walked in between taxis (primo color pop) and pursed my lips, Creel lowered his camera and offered a sincere compliment: "That was a great moment."

I posted my first picture around noon on a Sunday morning-a relatively conservative three-quarter-length shot, in which I perform a sultry lean against a chain-link fence in a plaid Perry Ellis bomber jacket. Appearing incongruously atop my previous photos-the utterly ordinary postings of a new dad-it didn't get a digital "like" for 15 minutes. That pace didn't bode well. Moderately successful influencers might get 100 likes or more in that period, and as I tried to focus on supervising my year-old daughter's play date, I was getting worried.

I probably should have anticipated this. Part of what makes Instagram valuable to advertisers is that there aren't many shortcuts to accruing an audience. Unlike Twitter, for instance, where a clever quip can be quickly retweeted, bringing a deluge of followers, Instagram is relatively resistant to viral growth. Pretty much the only way you can add to your flock is if someone happens on your profile, likes what he sees, and decides to follow you.

How do you get people to discover you? Your best hope is to use hashtags-that is, sticking a pound sign in front of a keyword to make it easier for users searching for a specific type of photo to find you. There's something tacky about using #liveauthentic, which has been deployed more than 14 million times, to get strangers to look at pictures that essentially amount to advertisements, but every influencer I spoke with assured me that hashtags worked, so hashtags it would be. Saynt recommended that I include at least 20 with every post.

Photographer: Amy Lombard for Bloomberg Businessweek

To avoid looking totally desperate, I hid my hashtags below a series of line breaks. To avoid any unnecessary creativity, I used an app, Focalmark, which allowed me to input a couple of variables about each shot-for instance that it was a portrait, containing menswear, in New York City-and would then spit out a list of hashtags. They were so embarrassing that I tried not to read them before sticking them in my Instagram feed. But here are a few that I used regularly: #menwithclass, #mensfashion, #agameofportraits, #hypebeast, #featuredpalette, #makeportraits, #humaneffect, #themanity, and, of course, #liveauthentic.

By dinnertime, I'd posted a second picture and had acquired a few dozen likes and roughly three followers. That's actually not bad for somebody with an almost nonexistent presence on Instagram, but it was discouraging to me, because I would need at least 5,000 followers to have any hope of making money. That night, I signed up for a service recommended to me by Socialyte called Instagress. It's one of several bots that, for a fee, will take the hard work out of attracting followers on Instagram. For $10 every 30 days, Instagress would zip around the service on my behalf, liking and commenting on any post that contained hashtags I specified. (I also provided the bot a list of hashtags to avoid, to minimize the chances I would like pornography or spam.) I also wrote several dozen canned comments-including "Wow!" "Pretty awesome," "This is everything," and, naturally, "[Clapping Hands emoji]"-which the bot deployed more or less at random. In a typical day, I (or "I") would leave 900 likes and 240 comments. By the end of the month, I liked 28,503 posts and commented 7,171 times.

Most committed influencers, including Socialyte's clients, use bots in one way or another, but it should be said that this is an ethical gray area. Instagram doesn't explicitly ban bots, but its terms of service do prohibit sending spam, which, when viewed in a certain light, is exactly what I was doing. On the other hand, except for a single user who somehow had me pegged and accused me of being a bot, nobody with whom I interacted seemed to mind the extra likes or comments. In fact, most of them would respond immediately with comments of their own. "Thanks dude!" they'd say. Or they'd simply give me a "[Praying Hands emoji]." I got hundreds of comments like this.

By the time I fell asleep that first night, I was getting a steady stream of likes and adding a new follower every couple of hours. By morning my post had more likes than anything I'd ever put on Instagram, including a shot in which I was holding my newborn daughter. In the picture, which my wife snapped from the end of the hospital bed, I'm lying back with my eyes closed, blissed-out and exhausted. It's the best, most honest picture anyone has ever taken of me, and it has half as many likes as that shot of me in the bomber jacket on the chain-link fence.

Socialyte had suggested I create three posts a day, which sounds easy since I already had most of the pictures I would need. It was not easy-and I spent much of the next month in a state of constant dread, mostly because I hadn't told my friends or family members about my Instagram experiment. After my mom gently inquired about, as she put it, "your male modeling career," and I told her I was working on a story, she let out a sigh. "Oh," she said. "I was worried there was some massive insecurity going on." My baffled friends also had questions. "First, you look boss. Congrats," my friend Dave wrote in a comment. "Second, what is going on?"

Another difficulty was that I'd been told to post at least one piece of "lifestyle content"-that is, a picture of something other than myself-every day. In general, pictures of people get more likes than anything else, but the idea was to create a sense of variety and to avoid boring my new audience. Alexander suggested sunsets, cityscapes, and food. "You don't have to eat it," she offered. "Just make it pretty."

I did my best, ordering fancy cocktails I wouldn't normally drink and trying to eat items, like avocado toast, I'd seen on Instagram. It was not enough. A week into our experiment, Alexander and Saynt informed me, in the gentlest manner possible, that my lifestyle content was terrible.

The natural solution was professional help. Alexander introduced me to Alisha Siegel, a wedding photographer by trade who also sells stock images to influencers. Siegel could offer me as many perfectly framed lattes, hipster hotel lobbies, and urban sunsets as I wanted. I bought 20 for $400, which brought my total tab for photography services to $2,000. I asked her about credit-should I note in my feed that she was the photographer? Siegel suggested that I might shout her out once or twice, but crediting her would break the illusion. As she pointed out, "You're the one who is supposed to be experiencing these things."

Armed with my lifestyle content, I felt a surge of confidence. I was adding 20 to 30 followers most days, up from 10 a day in the first week. When one of my friends asked me about a breakfast shot-specifically, what the hell was that yellow blob on top of my granola?-I evaded and moved on. (Citrus curd.) It no longer seemed weird that all day and all night my virtual double was doling out likes and saying things like "High five for that!" about pictures I had not seen and would never see.

By the end of Week Two, I'd reached 600 followers, or a threefold increase. Saynt told me he thought that if I kept it up, I could be at 10,000 by the end of the year, which would be enough to command maybe $100 per sponsored post. That was encouraging. But to keep up the pace, I'd have to spend $2,000 a month on photography services and also find a way to keep a steady stream of new outfits coming. There was no way I would ever break even on this; I clearly didn't have the talent.

On the other hand, I was already verging into "micro-influencer" territory, a hot new field within influencer marketing where, rather than hiring one or two big-time influencers, an ad agency will simply give out free merchandise to 50 small-timers. Micro-influencers are "a core piece of our strategy," according to Dontae Mears, a marketing manager at VaynerMedia. "You find the engagement is stronger. The trust is better. And you don't necessarily have to pay them."

The breakthrough came as my follower count pushed above 800. I got a message from Andrew Hurvitz, a photographer in Los Angeles and the founder of Marco Bedford, a clothing line. "You want to collaborate?" he wrote. I was ecstatic.

A few days later, one of his T-shirts was sitting in my mailbox. I pleaded with my wife-who had come to despise my transformation-to follow me outside on a Sunday evening with our digital camera. I wore my coolest jacket. I looked, wistfully, to my left. I ran my fingers through my influencer haircut. The picture did pretty well, earning 156 likes and, according to Instagram, reaching 468 people. As an official spokesman for Marco Bedford (#ad #sp #liveauthentic), I feel compelled to say that I stand by my characterization that Hurvitz's shirt, which retails for $59, is "beautiful."

My experiment was winding down, but I'd begun to wonder whether there might be an easier way to do all this. The internet is full of services that purport to deliver followers by the thousands. Buying followers-or buying likes and comments, which are also for sale online-won't trick sophisticated advertisers, because Instagram reports actual impressions and audience size. But the tactic can help make your profile look a little more impressive. There was a chance that a fake boost could turn into genuine momentum. And so, with a week or so left until my deadline, I logged on to a site called Social Media Combo, which promises "high quality followers." Packages range from $15 for 500 to $160 for 5,000. Not wanting to gild the lily-and slightly concerned about corporate AmEx card ramifications-I went for the base package.

For two days, nothing happened. Then, without warning, I jumped from 885 followers to about 1,400 in a matter of hours. By the time I posted my final influencer photo-a lifestyle shot of a flower shop that Siegel had sold me-on Nov. 11, Instagram had removed a bunch of my new fake admirers, but I was adding enough followers to mostly offset the drop-off. As I write this, I'm back up to almost 1,400. According to FollowerCheck, an app that purports to analyze an Instagram account for authentic engagement, 1,168 of my followers are real. I'm afraid to look to see how many of my actual friends have unfollowed me.

I quit posting the following day, a Saturday, and didn't put anything on Instagram for a full week. There were moments when that made me anxious-I still have a killer shot of myself in a camel-hair coat that's perfect for #autumn-and I started asking my fellow influencers what they thought I should do with my newfound fame. "I wouldn't throw it away," offered Yena Kim, the creator of the Instagram account Menswear Dog, which has 288,000 followers. "You should turn it into this dapper writer guy."

Photographer: Amy Lombard for Bloomberg Businessweek

Kim, a former designer for Ralph Lauren, told me she started her account as a sort of joke, too, posting photos of her shiba inu in men's sweaters and sport coats in the style of other popular fashion influencers. Now her dog, Bodhi, is a business and is represented by a special influencer pet agency, Wag Society. (The company is owned, improbably, by the New York Times Co. and boasts 150 clients, including hedgehogs, cats, and a potbellied pig named Esther.) "Whatever you do in life, it helps to have a following," Kim said. "It's going to help you professionally."

I am not and never will be Dapper Writer Guy. But I think she's probably right. I should keep going. As I wrote that last paragraph and prepared to mail Hurvitz his shirt back, I took another picture, an authentic one. It showed a desk-a horrible, embarrassing mess of a desk, with a paper plate and empty disposable cups and stacks of old magazines.

But as I went to post it, I hesitated, and had a thought: Wouldn't this look a little better with a filter?

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I've always been well-liked. At least, I think that's the case. I have friends, a spouse, a job, a college degree. I exercise. I get haircuts regularly. And yet lately I've felt unrealized-incomplete, almost. Everywhere I look on social media, I'm surrounded by extremely attractive, superbly groomed men and women who eat meals that are not only healthy but impeccably plated.

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Metrics and all sorts of data, are they important?

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Metrics and all sorts of data, are they important?

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Quantitative data is all the rage these days; numbers aren't just useful, they make us look competent. Better yet, they comfort us and give a sense of control. Data has become the opium of the modern tech companies. Want to look good in a meeting? Just open up a chart and say loudly "I've got the data!" Do that often enough, and the promotion is yours. That is if you don't drive your company to the ground.

Since we can collect so much data about virtually everything people do in our software, we cripple ourselves with information that doesn't matter. Making the wrong decisions has never been easier.

This post is an attempt to cut through the noise and save time for those who use metrics to gauge the health of their product or company. The metrics I list here belong to one of three major categories: user engagement, business, and customer service.

User engagement metrics

1. Number of sessions per user

This metric is a good starting point for user engagement and behavior analysis. It's also pretty easy to get; there's nothing simpler than tracking how often your users login or open your app.

Tip: Avoid averages and take medians over means, as they are less sensitive to outliers and give more robust statistics.

2. Session duration for a cohort, over time

For every new cohort of users, research how much time they spend interacting with your product. Again, take medians instead of means.
Tip: Compare your average session duration for churned and retained users for some eye-opening data. (E.g., those who churned within 30 days and those who stayed.)
3. Number of key user actions per session

Start by selecting user actions that matter most (e.g., clicks on the "like" button), then trace them over time and for different cohorts of users.

Tip: Compare the differences in this metric between churned and retained customers. Do a t-test.

Pro tip: Always use cohort analysis and time normalization for user engagement metrics. This will help you expose the differences in user behavior and their evolution over time.

Business metrics

1. LTV (customer lifetime value)

LTV is the amount of net profit you will generate from a customer before they churn or stop paying.

One common mistake many companies make is calculating customer lifetime revenue instead of LTV. Calculate LTV correctly by excluding the cost of servicing a customer: salaries of the support team, the cost of running your servers, and so on.

Tip: If you want to start a boardroom fight, ask your investors about the correct way to calculate LTV.

2. CAC (customer acquisition cost)

Take all your acquisition marketing costs, then divide that by the number of paying customers acquired over a period of time.

Another way to compute CAC is to include salaries of your acquisition marketers, commissions of the sales reps, etc., into the calculation. This will make CAC partially account for the burn rate. LTV and CAC are the most important metrics of startup unit economics, and they are usually considered together as LTV/CAC ratio.

The benchmark for a healthy SaaS startup LTV/CAC ratio should be three and above.

3. ARPA (average revenue per account)

ARPA is the worth of the monthly "contract" with the customer or user. To put it simply, this is how much money an average paying customer gives you every month. If your pricing is stable, ARPA growth means your team is doing something right to provide customers with more value and generate revenue in return.

Tip: Try increasing your ARPA without changes in product or pricing. Often, better support, marketing, and branding can do exactly that.

4. MRR (monthly recurring revenue)

MRR is self-explanatory. It is your company's revenue per month. Stable, and preferably non-linear, MRR growth is the best way to make your investors happy.

Pro tip: Make your investors happy.

5. Logo churn and revenue churn rates

Logo churn rate is the percentage of paying accounts your product loses per month. There are two ways to calculate it: per cohort and aggregated. Typically, cohort churn will yield higher numbers, so internally you should definitely use it. Revenue churn rate is the percentage of revenue your company loses per month due to churns or downgrades.

Tip: Pay less attention to logo churn and more attention to revenue churn. All in all, serving fewer customers and getting to pay more is better than serving a bunch and getting peanuts.

The benchmark for a SaaS startup's monthly logo churn rate should be below 2 percent. Your revenue churn should be negative.

6. Retention rate

Contrary to popular belief, the retention rate isn't as useful of a metric as churn rate. It's good to be aware of it, but it's far less actionable compared to other metrics.

Customer Service

1. Number of incoming support tickets

This metric is rather obvious; the more problems your users have with your product, the more tickets they submit. If you've just released something and the number of tickets spiked, this might be a sign of a problem.

2. Net Promoter Score

NPS is a proxy metric for customer satisfaction. However, before relying on NPS in your decision-making, you must know that it's not a scientifically-backed metric. For instance, a meta-analysis by Keiningham et al. found no support for the claim that NPS is a reliable indicator of a company's ability to grow.

Tip: Having high NPS is meaningless in itself. Instead, watch it grow, try reaching out to promoters, and ask them for reviews. You'll be surprised by the results.

Congratulations if you made it this far! The metrics above only scratch the surface of data-aware product management. If you want to use the data right, you will want to experiment with different types of analysis for different features of your product and in different stages of its life cycle. There's only one rule to be aware of at all times:

The fact that something has a number attached to it, doesn't always make it true, valid, or relevant.

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Dear product managers: not all metrics matter. Here are the ones that do

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Quantitative data is all the rage these days; numbers aren't just useful, they make us look competent. Better yet, they comfort us and give a sense of control. Data has become the opium of the modern tech companies. Want to look good in a meeting?

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Mub552 Consumer Behaviour - Lessons - Tes Teach

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Lesson description: In a mini-documentary, Booth professors discuss newly available data that is allowing researchers to gain a greater understanding of consumer behavior. This video is a companion to "The secrets of shopping," the cover story from the Fall 2013 issue o...

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Yet it's Hillary's unofficial campaign that's using the internet in a new way this election, with a secret weapon: Fiendishly viral websites, wrapped in superb designs, cutting words, and zany interactive elements. These sites are made pro bono, doing the funny, dirty work that's conveniently unaffiliated with Hillary's own campaign, like parodies that blow back Trump's weird hair with a trumpet, or have him toss Mexicans over the wall one at a time (just be careful not to hit the patriot in a sleeveless tee and trucker cap!).

These sites may not exist to say much or say it for that long. But in this way, they are perfectly attuned to the internet circa 2016, to dominate a quick hit social news cycle.

"Like all things, even this very article, the traffic spikes, then drops, and conversation moves on to the next thing," says Chris Baker. "We even have our own term for this--the fin. Because in analytics, the traffic pattern ends up looking exactly like a shark's fin. It spikes up, hangs for a day or two, then immediately drops off. We've learned to love the fin over here."

We've learned to love the fin over here.

Baker, along with Mike Lacher and Brian Moore, are the force behind , a left-leaning dig on the Republican party rendered in two-minute satirical games like Trump's Rampage and Science Fighter. The concept was inspired by Lacher and Baker's time working as creative directors at Buzzfeed. Could they design "playable news"-a sort of evolution of the poll or news quiz? This presidential election offered them the best test subject imaginable.

Their most recent release is a game called Trump's Pussy Grabber. It's essentially whack-a-mole, but the moles are kittens, and you hit them with a small, limp, pixelated Trump hand. I wouldn't call it funny to play, but it's almost funny that it exists, offering a cathartic release to the depressing news cycle.

Creatives tend to be very liberal. And we are in the unique position where we have the tools and talents to design messaging...quickly and cheaply.

No doubt, it helps that these games can be produced quickly, as relevance is their biggest draw. Pussy Grabber was built and released just a day after Trump's tapes with Billy Bush were leaked. "They're easy to make," says Baker. "More and more people know the tools to pump out a quick site. And because everyone is talking about the election, creative ideas centered specifically around the election are more likely to be thought up, so these mass news events end up yielding a huge range of creative."

The huge range of creative also comes from a pure numbers advantage. "Creatives tend to be very liberal," says Jessica Walsh of design firm Sagmeister & Walsh, "and we are in the unique position where we have the tools and talents to design messaging, merchandise, websites, videos, and other forms of communication quickly and cheaply." When conservatives try the same thing, it hasn't worked out so well.

With her firm Sagmeister & Walsh and the help of eleven artists, Walsh recently launched Pins Won't Save The World, a micro-shop full of pins that feature Trump as clown or his face emblazoned on toilet paper (the profits are donated). Walsh also teamed up with long-time collaborator Timothy Goodman on I'm With Her Because He's Cray-again, a funny, boldly designed site that promotes the simple message that it doesn't matter if Hillary is or isn't the perfect candidate, because Donald Trump is cra[z]y. It also features several videos of Trump impersonators making out with one another; featured on Snapchat, the videos received hundreds of thousands of views. And the site has served as a launching pad for several live performances and protests in the city.

Meanwhile, Hire the Donald is a site that poses itself as Donald Trump's own résumé. If you scroll over its content, with phrases like, "I am a leader. I've always been a leader. I've never had a problem leading people," you'll see a link to where Trump actually said those things. And as an added bonus, when you mouse over the letter itself, the page turns, and Trump seems to sign it with a lipstick kiss.

Our goal was to compose the most compelling threads into a single, undeniable argument.

Scroll lower, and you'll see a gif of Trump sobbing in royal, democratic blue tear streams, while words like "losers" and "haters" blink on the page, drilling the hate speech into your retinas in brazen glee. Again, it's the sort of internet-friendly, fact-backed propaganda that's just out of reach for Hillary's "go high" campaign against Trump. But it was just another day at the office for the design firm Hum, whose employees felt they couldn't be silent in this election. "We watched the case against Trump grow across a multitude of articles and news channels," says creative director Kate Harmer. "Our goal was to compose the most compelling threads into a single, undeniable argument. We used the format of a resume to reiterate that, simply put, Trump is a candidate for a very important job. We wouldn't trust him to fetch our coffee, let alone as leader of the free world."

Yet while many large and respected design firms may have piled on against Trump, the fact that all of this digital content is getting a lot easier to make means that even amateurs have gotten involved. Fraser Hemphill, an engineering student from Australia, took almost two years to build a mini game called Stop The Boats, about his country's conservative, trade isolationist Prime Minister Tony Abbott. But it only took him a day of work to re-skin it as Trump Simulator, in which you control Donald Trump's head as it blocks sombreros coming at the U.S. from all directions.

"I think this election has been so different to any before it, with social media playing a very strong part," says Hemphill, pointing specifically to the rising power of meme culture." In this particular case, however, Trump Simulator wasn't near the hit that his Abbott version had been, though it's been growing by tens of thousands of visitors a month into the election. That said, while Hemphill may not have managed to rise the tides in Hillary's favor, he did succeed at upsetting a lot of Trump's supporters, who called Hemphill a "Liberal shill who's living on benefits" while insisting that "There's no such thing as a skilled immigrant you dumb f**k".

"He's dangerous and laughable," says Hemphill of Trump when I ask his opinion, but without any perceivable ire. "I'm just expressing my views, and I don't think I'm any more of an activist than others expressing theirs."

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How The Internet Is Taking Down Trump-With Creativity

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Yet it's Hillary's unofficial campaign that's using the internet in a new way this election, with a secret weapon: Fiendishly viral websites, wrapped in superb designs, cutting words, and zany interactive elements.

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Videoclips from Instagram videos, why not?

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Videoclips from Instagram videos, why not?

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https://www.wired.com/2016/09/beck-built-latest-music-video-killer-instagram-clips/

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https://www.tes.com/lessons/npLh-KMW_vVmFg/mub552-week-3

Let's get to know a bit about the new media vs old media and how it's changing our lives. As well as how we can use these changes to our advantage.

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This is our first discussion for this week. Make sure you register for an account on Blendspace to participate.

https://www.tes.com/lessons/ItaVpU2O4HvluA

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Hi guys! Thank you for participating again this week ;)

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Hi

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This is our textbook for this semester. Available at the library ;)

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Maxis

https://twitter.com/maxislistens/status/749057614982500354

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https://www.lowyat.net/2016/100036/time-and-tm-trade-barbs-on-facebook/

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@kwamiodoom Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.

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@kwamiodoom Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.

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@NandosUK Just got a takeaway and got home to discover a missing red pepper dip and normal chips not peri. https://t.co/dEvrno1qL3

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Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.
— Nando's (@NandosUK) September 5, 2016

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@kwamiodoom Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
@NandosUK Just got a takeaway and got home to discover a missing red pepper dip and normal chips not peri. https://t.co/dEvrno1qL3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
@kwamiodoom Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
@kwamiodoom Hey, sorry about that. If you call the restaurant on 02073721507 and let the Manager know, they'll make it up to you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
@NandosUK Just got a takeaway and got home to discover a missing red pepper dip and normal chips not peri. https://t.co/dEvrno1qL3

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5/9
Chinese and malay paper are giving out different kind of information.

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First class! Get to know your social media!